


Camera Boy

by crackleviolet



Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-18 00:26:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10605474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crackleviolet/pseuds/crackleviolet
Summary: JuminV Week Day 3 Prompt: Alternate UniversesOkay. So.This is two AUs in one. It’s an AU of the main game in which Jumin is the MC and received the mysterious message instead of a stranger.This is also an AU where V route is a thing. There are some implied spoilers in regards to Rika, though nothing drastic.Since this chapter is not the full route and I made a lot of calls (in terms of JuMc and V route), there are notes at the end.





	

Jumin Han was not naive. **  
**

He graduated top of every class he had ever taken.

He spoke five languages and was in the process of studying a sixth.

For his 21st birthday, he took a class on fraud prevention.

He kindly reminded strangers of these facts as if treading the floorboards of an empty house, with no escape and only that singular fact to cling to. He spoke of his comprehension, rational mind and education on the same lines as he did his love for dry wine. He was not naive, as his Father proclaimed once that he surely must be.

When he received the mysterious message, Jumin questioned it, of course. He interrogated the stranger and demanded to know how they had gotten hold of his personal number. He did not know what sort of answer he expected from them, but he had spent the time in Rika’s apartment revisiting what few words they had actually offered. He sat there in silence for the most part, going over every single interaction he had had over the past few days and searching for a sign of duplicity. He was not overly trusting and quick to fall into traps and he was sure that if he thought about it for long enough he would see through the cracks and find a solution, whether it was a handshake that lasted fractionally too long or a comment made in passing that gained a new layer of meaning under his current circumstances.

Luciel had insisted he think twice about going to Rika’s apartment and V was in another province, otherwise he might have stopped him. Jumin supposed he understood his resignation on the matter. V had respected Rika’s privacy to greater degrees than most. Jumin too had hesitated before going inside, though only partially out of respect for the dead. He had recognised Rika’s address on the messenger screen, though had never been privy to the password before and when he entered it was as much out of curiosity and a desire to know if the password would work than it was any genuine desire to go inside.

Jumin had always known that Rika played a far more complicated game than he; that she danced with the fate of the RFA along with her own, and for the past year he had wondered why it was that she had not reached out through one channel or another and found some way to liberate herself of such a terrible fate when it was clearly within her power to do so.

But this was not about power. Not anymore. He knew that as he entered the apartment.

Jumin remembered the apartment only vaguely from prior visits. To the best of his recollection, Rika had rarely invited anyone to visit but V and he glanced over the bare surfaces and empty walls, taking a seat on the couch to consider his situation. Perhaps it was just a prank, he thought at first. Mean spirited, but a prank nonetheless.

Perhaps it was because he had spent so little time there, but he found himself making a conscious effort to imagine Rika in every corner, even though he knew such things were irrational. The apartment had the stale smell of disuse and dust, but at the back of his mind, he could almost see her. Rika sitting at the desk. Rika switching on the television. Rika reaching into her purse, ready to leave. She was not there, but he could smell her perfume as clearly as the last time she had reached up to adjust his tie.

Later, over voicemail, he told V that there was no blame. No rhyme. No reason. She was gone and the only clue she had ever existed were the golden hairs left behind and embedded in her pillow.

V did not respond though and even Jumin found himself going back to the apartment. He retraced the steps of the Rika in his imagination, reassuring himself of his own cool, analytical mind. Perhaps he, who saw things for what they truly were regardless of personal feelings, might see something no one else had.

But he never did.

For three days, he drafted text after text in the empty apartment. Message after message detailing the same singular fact. He was an only child and had spent much of his youth in houses as empty as that one. Ones that rang out with the voices of women who were not his mother. He always had V, though; one singular constant in a sea of ever changing faces.

He wanted to say that the past few years had been the emptiest of his life; that he did not know how to grieve the living, but he wondered if he ought to. Beyond his height and weight, he did not believe himself to be any different to the Jumin Han first introduced to the camera boy all of those years ago and yet nothing about their situation remained the same.

Every time he saw the words, however, he deleted them. For one reason or another, they were never the right things to say.

On the fourth day, he received a call from Luciel to his desk phone as he pulled on his jacket.

“What is it?” He asked, almost lazily. “Did you learn something about the hackers?”

He had not told Luciel exactly how many times he had visited the apartment, but he knew that was a moot point. Luciel’s job was discovering information and it was incredibly unlikely that he wasn’t keeping a close eye on the security cameras.

“Right to the point, I see!” Luciel laughed. “There’s been a development, though I’m not sure you’ll like it.”

“Surprise me.”

Jumin held his phone to his ear as his left his office, paying little attention to whichever staff he passed. He took the stairs to avoid losing signal in the lift, though even in the echoey surroundings, he was able to pick up on the fact that Luciel was hesitant about telling him.

“Rika wanted extra security at her apartment-”

“Yes, I remember. Living alone as she did, she became concerned about intruders.”

“There was more to it than that. The measures she suggested were…extreme.”

“What is it you’re not saying, Luciel?”

“Whoever led you to Rika’s apartment…whoever hacked the door to the apartment….it seems they have hacked into the security interface as well.”

Jumin did not know exactly what he meant, but he knew enough of Luciel’s history to appreciate its potential severity. He took a deep breath as he headed to the exit to the C&R building, meaning to allow the news to sink in as he called Driver Kim.

“I’ll call you back shortly,” he said.

It did not escape Jumin that going to the apartment was a fundamentally bad idea, but he needed to. He needed answers. He rejected each one of Luciel’s frantic incoming calls and took note that outside of the car window, it was starting to rain. He listened to the steady rhythm of each drop, remembering a winter many years ago.

He did not know why V climbed the tree outside of his bedroom window to tap at the glass, but Jumin’s stepmother had been on the phone for several hours in an attempt to persuade his father to come home and it was a welcome distraction from the obvious fact that it would take more than tears to convince him. It was raining even as he climbed out of the window and although he had on three pairs of socks, a sweater underneath his shirt, two pairs of gloves and a thick woollen coat, he had still shivered.

The pair of them sat in the tree for so long that eventually boredom won out and, since Jumin had a pack of playing cards at the desk near his window, settled on poker.

“Three Queens! I win again,” Jumin had said, lowering his cards. “Are you even trying, Jihyun?”

As the pair were all but nine, they could not exchange anything particularly valuable. Instead, Jihyun used the sweets in his pockets while Jumin used the crackers in his. Over the course of six matches, Jumin had gained a significant supply of plum candies, while his cracker supply remained somewhat intact.

Jihyun had reached into his pocket, laughing all of the while.

“My poker face isn’t as good as yours,” he had said, pulling out a candy. “How about we play blackjack?”

Jumin sighed at the memory, remembering the sweetness of the candy; how he had peeled off his gloves with his teeth and laughed at the prospect of playing blackjack. It was not his fault he was a better opponent, his hand freezing despite the extra layer, but if Jihyun wished to win back his honour then of course he would allow it.

Outside of the window, it was starting to rain and he listened to the steady rhythm of each drop. If he closed his eyes, he was back on that tree branch, shuffling the deck  and laughing, which only served to remind him that when he opened them he was alone.

When his phone began to ring again, he answered without checking the caller display.

“Luciel,” he said, “I-”

“It’s me.”

Jumin had not heard from V for days and his first thought was to ask if he remembered their game, but V had other ideas.

“Jumin…I heard from Luciel. Please. Promise me that you will not go to Rika’s apartment until it is stabilised.”

There was something to his tone. Something that left Jumin turning away from the window and motioning for Driver Kim to pick up the speed.

“You never did have a very good poker face,” he said before hanging up, wondering what on earth he was about to find.

The apartment had become something of an obsession, only it was no longer Rika’s ghost he searched for.

Even without the warning from Luciel, it was immediately clear when he arrived that all was not as it should have been. He did not know how to describe it and he did not believe in sixth senses, but there was something different about it this time around. A change in the atmosphere, just like the strange, tentative silence that followed after bad news in the boardroom. Jumin did not believe in sixth senses, but even he could see the signs of forced entry.

“Hello?” He called out, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone with trembling hands. “This apartment is private property and you-”

“Are trespassing?”

They were close. Jumin turned to the source of the noise but he wasn’t fast enough, for the stranger knocked his phone out of his hand and then proceeded to point a gun in his face.

It was a boy. Younger than him. Thin and pale haired, in dark clothes and grinning menacingly. For some reason, Jumin felt like he ought to have recognised him, though he knew without hesitation he had not met such a person before.

“Who are you?” He asked, taking on the formal tones of business to hide how he was actually feeling. “What are you doing here?”

“I should ask you the same thing,” said the stranger, pushing the barrel of the gun directly into his line of sight. “This is private property and you don’t live here either.”

For the first time in his life he wished he had listened to Luciel, though he never got the chance to reproach the stranger, for the moment he began to speak someone burst through the door. When he saw who it was, he froze on the spot.

“..V?” He gasped, taking in the way his old friend was visibly out of breath and clutching onto his walking stick, having presumably sprinted a distance.

For the briefest of instants, Jumin wondered if he had come to rescue him.

“Saeran,” said V, turning to the white haired boy. “The Saviour sent me.”

Jumin wondered which outcome suited him better. That V and the boy were honestly acquainted or that it was a hallucination.

“Why?”

The boy lowered his gun, but if anything he only seemed more angry.

“I am to take him to Magenta on her orders,” said V. “She chose me to be the one to bring him into Mint Eye.”

“You’re lying,” snarled the boy, who Jumin supposed answered to Saeran. “She would never choose you-she-”

Within seconds the fury that had so transformed his face dissolved into a grin.

“I don’t like this,” he said, “if you try anything while my back is turned-”

“We won’t,” said V, with an air of finality that left Jumin honestly curious.

“What…is going on?” He asked, glancing from V to Saeran. “I don’t understand.”

“Shut the fuck up, trust fund,” said the one called Saeran, pushing the barrel of the gun into his spine. “Let’s go.”

Jumin had no choice but to leave the apartment by his command, glancing at V out of the corner of his eye all of the while.

There was no way V knew this person.

The V that he knew cried over crushed beetles and studied the stars.

But as he left the apartment, the sound of his abandoned cell phone chiming through the open door, the realisation that this was not the V that he knew began to sink in.

“There’s no way that she chose you,” said Saeran, turning left to take the stairs.

“Perhaps not,” said V, then lifting his walking stick. “We should take the lift.”

Saeran was not happy about it, but obliged, pressing the button to call the lift up to their floor. All of the while Jumin wondered what to do. Should he at the very least try to escape? What would happen if he did?

The lift arrived a moment or two later and V stepped inside.

“Is anyone on guard?” He asked, reaching out to press the button for the ground floor.

Saeran took a step backwards to check and Jumin took his chance. He had taken multiple classes in self defence, though had never had much cause to use them up until that moment. His movements were erratic as he hit the boy’s throat with the solid force of his elbow, but it was enough opportunity for him to wrench the gun from his hands and toss it halfway across the corridor.

As he launched himself into the lift and watched V slam his hand against the button for the doors, he could not help but notice Saeran catching his breath and realising the trick just as the doors closed behind them and he was left stranded.

He knew it was his chance for freedom and he ought to have felt relieved, but he hesitated, the adrenaline still coursing through his veins.

“Jumin,” said V. “We don’t have much time. He’ll be following us.”

“What the hell is going on? Did you come here because of the hacker?”

V sighed, leaning into the wall of the lift.

“That’s…I,” he said. “No.”

When he looked up, there was genuine misery in his face.

“Jumin,” he said, “things are complicated.”

And Jumin, who prided himself in the fact that he did not fall for tricks and was not so easily swayed by the same foolhardiness that took over the masses, honestly came to question his own naïveté.

“Then simplify it for me,” he said.

“I can’t,” said V, tracing his fingers through his hair and sighing deeply. “I’m sorry, Jumin.”

“But after this is over?”

Jumin remembered whispered secrets on hazy afternoons. Secrets: like the time he screamed at his stepmother that he didn’t trust her and she looked at him afterwards like he’d unleashed the wrath of heaven. Children are supposed to trust their Mothers without question, but he had done the unforgivable and spoken out of turn. And even then he didn’t know why he bothered with explanations, for she was closed to the conversation the moment it began.

Closed, like the wing of an apple white butterfly Jumin clutched in his hand once, only to spend the rest of his life guilty because in his curiosity he stole away its flight. And he had always been so outspokenly proud of his crystal clear memory, but nobody who knew him would believe it to be true.

He was a dead man walking before he met the camera boy.

“Go back to C&R,” said V. “Go back to your office and forget you ever knew me. You…and the world…it’s better that way.”

One moment he was laughing in despair at his friend’s hollow words. The next Jumin had him by the scruff of the neck, pushed against the wall of the elevator.

“Do you take me for a fool, Jihyun?”

“Jumin…”

“Whatever it is you’re hiding…whatever it is that haunts you…trust it to me.”

He was furious. He was devastated. He was a mixture of so many different things that he didn’t know how he felt and he rested his forehead against V’s to speak in a softer voice.

“If you disappear, I’ll only follow. Don’t treat my friendship-don’t treat me-as something to be cast aside and forgotten. Does it mean so little to you, even after all of this time?”

V paused. Rested his hand on the one of Jumin’s that rested on his shirt.

“Jumin, I know you must be angry.”

Jumin remembered the day of Mrs Kim’s funeral. More specifically, he remembered the way that Jihyun had vanished for weeks afterwards and the next time he saw him was sitting by the fire at one of his father’s parties.

There was something distasteful about the way the other guests came and went; some staying only briefly to admire Mr Kim’s paintings, while others chatted noisily about current events. No one passed comment on the boy sitting by the fire, but it was an image that Jumin could never forget.

The last guest to leave intended to do a little reading in the next room and switched the lights off, leaving the room so dark that when the door next opened and Jumin came back with food from the main atrium, it was bathed in firelight.

“You know,” he had said, approaching Jihyun. “You’re going to scare people if you sit in the dark like that.”

Jihyun had hugged his knees closer to his chest and sighed, glancing at the plate of sandwiches Jumin had placed on the table and scanning for his outline in the shadowy room.

“Say, Jumin?”

“Mmmm?”

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

As if in frustration, Jihyun had taken a brand and poked at the flames, watching as they unfurled before his eyes. He seemed surprised when Jumin took a seat next to him.

“How many fires have you made in your time, Jihyun?” He asked, ‘tsk’-ing in the manner he promised never to use when he grew older. He lifted a block of firewood from the bucket next to the fireplace and placed it on the pitiful flame, making a tent of sorts with the existing firewood. Satisfied with the growing warmth, he lifted a sandwich and leaned back on the knuckles of his other hand as he took a bite.

“At my Mother’s funeral,” Jihyun had said. “I couldn’t cry. Not a single tear. Do you think that makes me a bad person?”

“I’m not a therapist, you know.”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

Even then, Jumin remembered how the awkward silence that followed was only emphasised by the corridor outside, which was a buzz of voices, laughter and glasses tinkling over multiple toasts.

“I wish…” Jihyun’s eyes were welling with tears. “I wish that there was a place where nobody got hurt. Where no one was ever lost or forgotten or left behind. I wish there was a world without pain or heartache.”

And Jumin had smiled faintly at the naivety of such a dream, without letting on that with every new stepmother he had come to wonder the same thing, even if he was loathe to say so out loud.

He appreciated the irony on a brand new level as they reached the ground floor and the doors to the lift opened up.

“Jumin,” said V. “Please. Don’t come looking for me. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”

He let go of V’s shirt and adjusted his tie, leaving him alone there with one singular thought circling his mind.

He was a fool for ever thinking he’d known the camera boy.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m unsure if Jumin MC would have the party, so I haven’t alluded to it.  
> This chapter spans from day 1 to about day 5  
> This chapter marks the first branch. I think that if Jumin had not fought back against Saeran, he might have had the bad end  
> Since, for me, V route would be all about trust (and V is a red herring in the main game), the next chapter -if I did one haha- would involve Jumin going to see Seven and Seven freaking out over Saeran on the cams.  
> Seven’s reaction and growing lack of trust (and the revelations) causes Jumin to question his own stance.  
> Jumin trusts him despite internal conflict and that’s what spurs the happy ending. (The Good End)


End file.
